Hi, I'm Erin. I work in a middle school library in Maine. I love to blog about anything that has to do with children's literature, the horror genre, authors, book festivals, arts and crafts, literary theory, film adaptations of books, history, libraries, classic film, women's studies and anything else that catches my interest.

Friday, April 7, 2017

The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda

In the spirit of Gene Luen Yang’s call for Reading Without Walls, I picked up a book the other day that had never intended to read.

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is a book that I’ve seen a million times: on the library shelf, for sale at Walmart and Target, and in the hands of many middle schoolers. I have no interest in origami, never even attempted it because I find folding pieces of paper to be very boring, and I also have no interest in Star Wars. (Luckily, my disinterest in “a galaxy far, far away” is not a deal breaker for my husband).

But I wanted to try something new, and this book is pretty short and very easy to read so I decided to give it a shot. I was surprised that I liked it as much as I did.

It’s not really about Star Wars, either. It’s about a weird kid who wears a paper Yoda puppet on his finger. ‘Yoda’ dispenses advice on everything from romance to self-acceptance. The other kids can’t figure out if ‘Yoda’ is actually helping them, or if this kid, Dwight, is 1) playing some elaborate joke or 2)actually believes that Yoda is an independent being that lives on his finger.

The set-up of the book and the humor in it remind me of the Wimpy Kid series, which I loooooooooove. The Wimpy Kid books never fail to make me laugh, and I did laugh out loud when I came across this sentence: “He’s as crazy as a bald gorilla.”I'm not sure if gorilla's with receding hairlines are actually crazy, or if they are, how the two are connected, but it's one of my favorite new expressions now.